Welcome to Dreamwidth, Tumblr folks!

[denise]

With the new update to Tumblr's community guidelines announcing that they will no longer permit adult content on their site, we'd like to take a moment to reassure all y'all that we have your backs. With a very few exceptions (such as spam and the like), if it's legal under US law, it's okay to post here. We're 100% user-supported, with no advertisers and no venture capitalists to please, and that means we're here for you, not for shady conglomerates that buy up your data and use it in nefarious ways.

Tumblr's definition of "adult content" seems to be inherently visual, and I also wanted to remind people that we do have basic image hosting. (It's definitely not as slick and easy to use as Tumblr's, I won't lie, but it does exist.) If you want to include images in your posts, you can upload them and the site will give you HTML that you can paste into your entry. Or, if you have post-by-email set up, just attach the image to the end of your email and it'll be posted. All users have a 500MB image hosting quota right now. I know that's small for people looking for a place to host NSFW image blogs, but we are reviewing usage statistics to see if we can increase it, or at least make it possible for people to pay for more quota like you can for more icons.

For those asking whether we have a mobile app: we don't at the moment! There are many (soooooo many) prerequisites that we have to do first, which we've been working on but haven't yet finished, because we're dealing with a lot of systems and architecture decisions that were made nearly 20 years ago by now. (A mobile app would also be subject to the same censorship pressure Tumblr faced -- it's looking pretty good that Apple taking the Tumblr app out of the App Store was the proximate cause of Tumblr's content guidelines change, and Apple is notoriously strict on apps for sites that allow user-generated content -- so even once we have one, it's even odds on how long it'll be able to stay available for certain platforms.) We've been trying to improve the website's experience on small screens in the meantime, and that's an ongoing project that we'll do our best to devote some more attention to over the next few months.

Feel free to use the comments to this post to recommend communities to join and to make new friends, whether you're here for the first time as a Tumblr refugee or have been here since the start (and any range in between). To the newcomers: we're happy to have you join us. Welcome aboard!

(Comment notification emails may be delayed for an hour or two, due to the high volume of emails generated by a dw_news post. This was posted at 2105/9:05PM EST (see in your time zone). Please don't worry about delayed notification emails until at least two hours after that. I also apologize to anyone who gets a notification for this post twice; we're trying to figure that one out.)

Comments

[neotech]

I can't be more thankful that I have discovered this site after Sims 4 players have decided to boycott Tumblr. This is because the biggest Sims 4 CC archive is being falsely taken off of Tumblr due to being wrongfully flagged as NSFW 18 months ago.

Let me tell you, Tumblr did this as a response to their app being taken down for child pornography!!!! And believe me, they know damn well they are FILLED with these people. They adopted the label MAP (Minor Attracted Person), set camp in Tumblr, and Tumblr did absolutely nothing about them! THEY ALLOWED THESE PEOPLE ONTO THE SITE.

It took them 4 MONTHS to get back to my report of a user who was writing smut of Renjun and Chenle, who were both 17, and 16 internationally at the time I reported. I provided screenshots, and contact info for the agencies in question and yet it still took them that long just to even receive my report.

Seeing that notification on my phone tore my soul apart. I dropped Tumblr immediately after I saw the details to the e-mail.

I am glad to see that you two believe in the same anti-censorship values as I do. This site could be the one to bring Tumblr onto its knees in the next few years!

[denise]

Hi! I'm not 100% familiar with the example you give, so this might not be relevant, but to make sure that you aren't disappointed if it comes up later, I do want to be very clear that we don't consider any text-based erotica to be a violation of the Terms of Service, even if it involves fictional or IRL people who are under the age of 18 as characters in the work. We go by US law, and US law is equally clear that "child pornography" is a label that can only be applied to images, not text. (Specifically, that for an image to be child pornography, it must be a photo of an actual minor or photorealistic depiction of a minor indistinguishable from an actual minor, containing either visible genitalia or depicting the minor in the process of a sexual act: drawings, line art, cartoons, doujinshi, etc, all don't meet the definition.) So, while we absolutely would remove any child pornography and report it in the appropriate places if it were posted to the site -- as we're required to by law! -- we use the US legal definition of "child pornography", not the commonly-misunderstood one that I've seen in a lot of places.

I know that legal definitions are different in different countries, but we're based in the US, and so we follow US law. We do encourage our users to properly flag and warn for their content so people don't see things they don't want to see, but we don't require it.

[neotech]

I understand your reasoning. Unfortunate, but reasonable. I am not entirely knowledgeable on US law as I'm Canadian, and not American.

I also feel it is wrong on a moral level to write, or draw erotica of any real person, even if they are over the age of 18. Especially of K-pop idols, who rely heavily on their public image and reputation being good amongst the public. That's just a personal opinion of mine though.

As long as it is legal in the US, then they should be allowed to post those sorts of things here. I also do not think it would be illegal here either considering the age of consent here is 16.

Regardless, I won't crucify anyone that is into that sort of thing. That would make me a hypocrite.